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GERMANY 
IN THE WAR AND AFTER 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
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MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

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TORONTO 



GERMANY 
IN THE WAR AND AFTER 



BY 



VERNON KELLOGG 

Author of "Headquarters Nights" 



H3eto gork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1919 

All rights reserved 



^ 



.K*^ 



Copyright, 1919 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, July, 1919 



JUL 26 J9/9 



A529395 



PREFACE 

With the external manifestations of Germany 
during the war and since the Armistice the world 
is familiar. But with what was going on inside 
that extraordinary country, among those extraor- 
dinary people, during the war and immediately 
after it, the world is less familiar. 

It has been my privilege and necessity in 
the course of my duties since May, 19 15, up to 
the present time, in connection with the work of 
the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the United 
States Food Administration, and the American 
Relief Administration, all under the directorship 
• of Herbert Hoover, to have some rather close 
personal acquaintanceship with Germans and Ger- 
man conditions during all of that time. 

The present opportunity is given me to bring 
together and expose whatever of my knowledge 
seems pertinent to the need of us all to under- 
stand as well as we can the war-time and post- 



Preface 

war experience and situation and the probable 
future behavior and possibilities of Germany. 

My thanks are given to my friend, Mr. Ellery 
Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic Monthly f for 
permission to use in this book whatever I care 
to from a recent paper published in his magazine. 

V. K. 

New York City, 
July, 19 19. 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

All the chapters in this book except the last one 
were written after the Armistice but before the 
signing of the Treaty. The last one was written 
immediately after the Treaty was signed. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

a post-mortem i the german army ... ii 

German Control of Germans 20 

What the Blockade Did to Food .... 30 

Other Inside Difficulties During the War . 45 

How the People Were Deceived . . . .57 

What the Germans Thought During the 
War and Armistice 66 

Germany Now and To-morrow 79 



GERMANY 
IN THE WAR AND AFTER 

CHAPTER I 

A POST-MORTEM: THE GERMAN ARMY 

A post-mortem examination of the patient 
often reveals the cause, or causes, before that 
only imperfectly understood, of the fatal illness. 
Of course, sometimes it does not. The case of 
the collapse of militaristic Germanism is one that 
urgently calls for examination after the event. 
We need to find out, for the sake of knowing what 
not to do or be, as much as we can of what im- 
perial Germany did or was that brought her to 
a timely end. 

There may be some who will remonstrate that 
this end has not come yet, and that a present post- 
mortem examination of Germany is premature. 
In all truth, imperial Germany is not wholly dead. 

But sometimes, for that matter, neither is the more 

ii 



12 Germany in the War and After 

usual subject of a post-mortem wholly dead at the 
time of the examination. The human body does 
not all die at one moment; it dies by parts, by 
organs, by tissues, one after another. For ex- 
ample, the amoeboid white blood corpuscles, the 
most independent parts of the body, go on moving 
and functioning long after the heart has stopped 
beating. The army was the heart of premortem 
Germany. It has stopped beating. And it is 
revealing some curious phenomena in the course 
of its decomposition. 

Hauptmann Graf W. had been my escort offi- 
cer at German Great Headquarters in Charleville 
in 19 1 5 and 19 16. It was he who had been the 
one, as described in an earlier book, 1 to break in 
on my attempt to explain one night at dinner, 
on his invitation, to a group of Headquarters offi- 
cers just what it is that America understands by 
democracy. I had proceeded but a little way 
in my explanation when he interrupted, rather 
violently, with the exclamation: "Democracy 
— bah — license, lawlessness, anarchy." On his 
hurried way from Charleville to Germany after 
the Armistice he passed through Brussels and 

1 Headquarters Nights, 1918, Atlantic Monthly Press. 



A Post-Mortem: The German Army 13 

talked with one of our C.R.B. (Commission for 
Relief in Belgium) men. 

He was still boasting — entirely characteristic 
of him — but it was a strange, new boast he ut- 
tered. Always, at Headquarters, and in our long 
motor journeys over Occupied France on relief 
business, in enforced companionship, he had up- 
held against me the great advantage, nay, the ab- 
solute necessity, if a people was to be well gov- 
erned and successful, of a military autocracy. If 
America wished to be great, or if she had for the 
moment the seeming of greatness but wished to 
assure the continuance of this greatness, she should 
acquire as soon as possible a Kaiser and General 
Staff. Germany was the greatest nation in the 
world because it enjoyed just these particular 
blessings; of course, incidentally its people, its 
Kultur, etc., etc., were the best, etc., etc., ad 
nauseam. 

But Hauptmann Graf W. had learned, surpris- 
ingly quickly, a new boast. Germany was now 
really going to be the greatest nation because she 
had got a splendid new government, a real demo- 
cratic government, not a pseudo-democracy like 
America's, where the President was more of an 



14 Germany in the War and After 

autocrat than any King or Kaiser in Europe, but 
the most real thing in democracies conceivable. 

My astonished C.R.B. friend stammered out 
a question. " Do all the officers at Great Head- 
quarters and all the other officers say this, too? 
Do they all think as you do? " 

" No, not all ; some are fools. But sixty per 
cent, of them do; and the other forty per cent. — 
well, they don't count." 

This seems hard to understand. But I know 
the Hauptmann Graf W. very well, and many 
others like him. It was the acceptance of author- 
ity, the cringing to power. The Kaiser had run 
away; so had some of the General Staff ; the others 
were rapidly changing their clothes, doffing uni- 
forms for mufti. The " real democracy " was 
in power; hence, knuckle down to it. This is not 
to say that there are no Germans who believe in 
democracy and want it. Only the Hauptmann 
Graf W. is not one of them. He accepts the real 
democracy — if it can give the orders. 

Some of the leading German officers and offi- 
cials in Belgium, men of the Governor-General's 
staff, gave an edifying exhibition in Brussels 
shortly before scurrying away. The German sol- 



A Post-Mortem: The German Army 15 

diers, at the suggestion and with the moral sup- 
port of a group of soldier-council emissaries from 
Hamburg and Berlin, took control of the army 
in most of Belgium on the day before the Armis- 
tice. The insignia of rank were stripped from 
the officers' uniforms, or the officers were ordered 
to strip themselves of their insignia, which they 
did, and a Soldat en-Rath was established in Brus- 
sels under the leadership of Private Einstein. 
This council requested the attendance at one of 
its meetings of half a dozen of the highest Ger- 
man officers and officials in the city, men who had 
been the rulers of Belgium for fours years, whose 
word had meant life or death to German soldiers 
and Belgian civilians up to this very moment. 
They came to the meeting. They came early. 
They were there before Einstein arrived. When 
he came in they rose from their chairs and stood 
respectfully until he was seated. 

Amazing? It was beyond words. I can 
hardly write this. It is too good to be true. Yet 
it is the truth. These were the men who had 
shot Miss Cavell and scores of the fearless Bel- 
gians; the men who had brutalized thousands of 
German soldiers ; the men who had insulted, times 



i6 Germany in the War and After 

unnumbered, the Americans of the Relief Com- 
mission. How many times, for the sake of the 
work, had we accepted from them, unanswered, 
with faces burning from anger and shame, a bru- 
tal or insulting remark! How we had almost 
come to fear them ! They could do anything. 

Private Einstein had learned the language of 
command; not by using it, but by hearing it, by 
having it growled or barked at him. He used it 
now. The others knew it, too. And they knew 
the proper response. Each knew how to lift im- 
passive face to it, hands down on trousers seams. 
Private Einstein gave each the opportunity to 
practice a little all that he had so long practiced. 

Then he told them what to do and what not to 
do. He said that he was informed that the jails 
in Namur had not yet been opened. Would 
Governor H., governor of all of Walloon Bel- 
gium, see to it that the prisoners, British, French, 
Italian, were all released by night? Gov- 
ernor H. would see to it. Would Graf R., 
who had lived in the same house with Governor- 
General von Bissing, and used this familiar inter- 
course to rise to great power in Belgium, do this 
other particular thing that Private Einstein wished 



A Post-Mortem: The German Army 17 

done? And would Baron von der L., chief po- 
litical adviser of the successive Governors-General 
of Belgium, and a widely known figure in German 
diplomacy and official intrigue, do that other 
thing? The humble servants of Private Einstein 
assured him that they would. 

Is this credible ? It happened. 

In the few days after that meeting these men 
disappeared from Belgium. They slunk away in 
concealing civilian clothes to Holland or Ger- 
many. Haughty Rupprecht, crown prince of Ba- 
varia, escaping the bullets shot into his house, took 
refuge in the Spanish Legation, whence he was 
taken under the Spanish flag to the Dutch frontier. 

A few officers not so high in rank and not so 
easily convinced of the advantage of the new de- 
mocracy — some of the foolish forty per cent, per- 
haps — resisted feebly. They continued to wear 
their uniforms and insignia and tried to give or- 
ders to their men. Some of them were shot, and 
others shot at. From the Palace Hotel, former 
convivial headquarters of German officers back 
from the front on leave in Brussels, and now taken 
possession of by the soldiers, a machine gun spat 
bullets across the square into the windows of the 



1 8 Germany in the War and After 

Cosmopolite, last hold-out of the recalcitrant offi- 
cers. The soldiers, the soldier-councils, were giv- 
ing the rulers of Germany their first lesson in the 
" splendid new democracy." 

It is apparently not necessary to observe — 
which, nevertheless, I do here parenthetically — 
that this is not exactly our idea of democracy, for 
the officers had no representation in it. It was 
dictatorship, just as the former autocracy was dic- 
tatorship. The rule of the proletariat alone is 
no more democratic than is the rule of the nobles 
alone. Bolshevism is not democracy. It is the 
exchange of the tyranny of Kings and Nobles and 
General Staffs for the tyranny of the bottom rung 
in the political and social ladder. Russia illus- 
trates this now ; Germany will illustrate it to-mor- 
row if the Spartacists have their way. 

But to return from the parenthesis. One other 
Brussels happening must be recorded. It is the 
departure of the German occupying troops. 

On " Liberation Sunday" (November 17th) 
my wife watched for three hours from a curtained 
window on the Boulevard du Regent that strange 
procession of beaten conquerors passing by, the 
last crazy caravan of mixed German soldiers, 



A Post-Mortem: The German Army 19 

seized Belgian cattle and looted Belgian household 
belongings piled high on gun carriages, munition 
wagons, passenger hacks and hucksters' carts, 
moving east. The significant thing to me about 
this procession — in special connection with the 
point I am laboring — is that despite the uprising 
of the soldiers and degradation of the officers dur- 
ing the last week before the evacuation, when the 
troops moved away — with their final loot — 
they were led and kept in line by officers ! It was 
the effect of long tradition and ingrained habit 
reasserting itself. In taking up familiar perform- 
ance again the soldiers needed, or thought they 
did, or just accepted without need or thought, 
some kind of control. They wanted somebody 
over them, somebody to rely on, some one to or- 
der them; they wanted to be reassured by the 
familiar bark. Which has its significance to be 
considered, it seems to me, in any attempts to esti- 
mate just how rapidly democracy will really come 
to its own in new Germany. 



CHAPTER II 

GERMAN CONTROL OF GERMANS 

At the time of this writing Noske, minister of 
national defense, is the strong man of the Major- 
ity Socialist administration of Germany and the 
man on whom chiefly depends the hope of a con- 
tinuing orderly or semi-orderly government. By 
the time this is published he may not be ; before 
then he may be assassinated; he almost certainly 
will be if the Spartacists can get to him. But now 
he is the strength of the Government. Why? 
Because, although he is a socialist and man risen 
from the ranks, he uses the control methods of 
the old regime. He wields the Big Stick; he 
controls by force. The Germans understand his 
ways. He orders them, and sends troops to en- 
force his orders. The Ebert-Scheidemann bloc 
has a large majority in the National Assembly, 
and the majority socialists have a larger number 
of voters than any other German party, but this 
alone is not sufficient to give them control. They 

20 



German Control of Germans 21 

must have a Noske and the Noske method of pre- 
vailing upon the people to accept their decrees. 
The splendid new democracy will do very well, 
and Hauptmann Graf W. and his kind will see its 
reasonableness and advantage — as long as it can 
give, and enforce, its orders. 

The way to control Germans and Germany, to 
make decrees valid, to make promises and agree- 
ments binding, to make treaties sacred, is by force. 
At least, this is the way until the New Day really 
comes in Germany. This the French know very 
well and this is why France goes panicky to-day 
when she sees, or thinks she sees, any signs of any 
releasing of the grip that the world has on Ger- 
many. The attainment of the present moment 
has cost her such sacrifice, and so weakened her ■ — 
despite her great success — that any surrender 
of control spells danger and horror to her. The 
Great Menace is removed; it must never, never 
return. That is the dictating note in all of the 
international politics of France to-day. 

But Germany is more broken than France seems 
to realize. Perhaps I can even say, she is more 
changed. Anyway for a strong nation to be 
broken is to be changed. When our first food 



22 Germany in the War and After 

mission to Poland reached the Swiss-Austrian fron- 
tier in January, we looked for possible trouble 
from the Austrian border officials with regard to 
our passports and papers and the numerous bags 
and boxes which contained our food and special 
traveling conveniences. But no Austrian officials 
appeared to look at our papers or examine our 
baggage. When, made bolder by this, we de- 
manded that somebody stamp our passports as 
seen, so that any later inspection by the police in 
Vienna or in passing out through the northern 
Austrian frontier might not lead to trouble for 
lack of these vises, we were told by representa- 
tives of a Sold at en-Rath: " We are a republic 
now; anybody can come and go; any goods can 
come and go; you don't need any papers; we don't 
want to look at anything." To be sure this was 
Austria, not Germany; but it was in a land of Ger- 
man ways. And it was a great change from other 
days. 

I cannot put into words the profound impres- 
sion of brokenness that Vienna and the Viennese 
make on one. Some reports have come to Amer- 
ica that the Vienna Opera is still open, that the 



German Control of Germans 23 

cafes are full in the afternoons. This is true. 
People in prolonged times of distress go on with 
many of their traditional habits if they can. All 
through the German occupation of Brussels the 
people, at any rate the little people, crowded the 
cinemas and cafes. There was not much in the 
cafes to eat or drink, the coffee was not coffee, 
the cakes were coarse war bread. But the people 
came and sat in their accustomed places, and 
looked over the German-censored newspapers, en- 
tirely disbelieving what they read, and exchanged 
in whispers the latest underground news or ru- 
mors. 

So in Vienna the common people by force of 
habit and for the lack of better to do, crowd the 
cafes; and they go to their beloved opera on the 
few nights that the city can spare coal and light- 
ing for it. But, in fact, Vienna, " die lustige, 
schone Stadt Wien" is the most depressed and 
depressing great city of Europe that I have seen. 
Its people show a fatal apathy, broken, with no 
initiative to help themselves, waiting for some 
one to come to their aid, and apparently hope- 
less of that. It is really horrible. This, at least, 



24 Germany in the War and After 

is my impression of Vienna as I saw it at various 
times in January, February and March of this 
year. 

Brussels in the darkest days of her four years' 
isolation and martyrdom was never like this. 
Warsaw in November, 19 15, when I saw her soon 
after the iron hand of von Beseler had closed on 
her, nor in January of this year when I first saw 
her again after she had been released and was 
struggling all unaided to find herself, with her 
country without food or clothing, without work 
for her workmen, without stable government, 
without recognition and trying to fight on three 
fronts against Bolshevists, Ruthenians and Ger- 
mans — Warsaw was not like this. 

And, finally, a great difference is apparent in 
Germany itself. Perhaps we cannot say that 
Germany is broken as one can certainly say of 
Austria, but if the French could see more of the 
interior of Germany, see Berlin, Munich, Leip- 
zig, Hamburg and Frankfort, see the kind and 
quantity and quality of the food the Germans have 
to live on, see the clothing and shoes they have to 
wear, see the type of men at her head that she has 
to depend on for guidance and control, see the 



German Control of Germans 25 

extraordinary difference between the little almost 
unrelated groups of voluntary soldiers under offi- 
cer adventurers that she has chiefly to depend on 
as army to quell her food and labor riots and pre- 
serve her from Spartacist uprisings, as compared 
with that terrible machine of precision and power 
that swept through Belgium and into France in 
19 14 and held these ravaged lands through all 
those long years until the debacle came — if more 
of the French could see more of all this, they 
would be less panic-stricken in their fear of a 
possible swift recuperation of imperial Germany 
and an overpowering German army. 

From my hotel window in Berlin in February 
I used to watch almost each day the march past 
down Wilhelmstrasse of the guard, at noon, on 
its way to relieve the morning squad at the Chan- 
cellor's palace. The band played well, but the 
soldiers marched poorly. People of the street 
walked along beside them and chatted with them; 
urchins ran through the column; the leaders and 
side guides were men from the ranks. Few offi- 
cers' uniforms were seen on the streets ; they were 
not healthful clothes to wear. We saw a good 
deal of a Major von S., attached to the Foreign 



26 Germany in the War and After 

Office. He arranged most of our food confer- 
ences with the government officials for us. When 
we saw him in his own rooms he wore his uni- 
form with the broad red Staff stripe down the 
trousers; when we saw him in other offices or on 
the street he was in mufti. The insolent Prus- 
sian officer no longer lords it down Unter den 
Linden; his uniform and saber are tabu; he, him- 
self, in mufti, is unrecognizable, and glad, for 
his health's sake, to be so. 

All over Berlin are placards signed by Major 
X. or Oberst Z. calling on men who wish to be 
soldiers to enroll themselves with me, to join my 
crowd. You will be lodged, fed and paid by the 
Government and commanded by me. There is 
something in it for all of us. 

These are the freiwillige bands that largely 
compose the German army of to-day; almost in- 
dependent groups, loosely disciplined with the 
German counterparts of the old Italian condot- 
tiere to lead them; these are the "Regiment 
Gerstenberg/ } " Regiment Reinhardt" " Regi- 
ment Oefen," that one reads of in the newspapers 
as appearing here and there where trouble rises 
to machine-gun the illegal food-sellers, the " Wild- 



German Control of Germans 27 

Haendler" of the Moabit, or the Spartacist riot- 
ers in Hamburg, Halle, or Leipzig. They do not 
compose an overpowering German army, nor are 
they likely to. To be sure one of these condot- 
tiere may turn out to be a man of magnetism and 
ambition; he might possibly gather round him 
many of these groups and tie them together; he 
might, possibly, become a military dictator. It 
is a contingency to reckon with. But it is a re- 
mote contingency. 

There has been an impressive and dangerous 
break-down of governmental control in Germany 
since the debacle of the imperial government and 
army, a break-down to be expected, but to be reck- 
oned with in all considerations of German possi- 
bilities. Street crimes, petty robbery, hold-ups, 
illegal food-selling, disregard of the old Verbotens 
that so strictly and minutely controlled the per- 
sonal life of the Germans, all of these go on 
openly and winked at by military and police offi- 
cials. 

The break-down in food-control has upset all 
governmental calculations and attempts to make 
the food supply last out until the next harvest. 
Many reports have come to America from our 



28 Germany in the War and After 

soldiers and our visitors along the Rhine, of the 
plentiful supply of food available in Germany. 
They really mean to speak of the plentiful supply 
available in the territory occupied by the Allies. 
Food flows toward occupying armies. The very 
abundance of food along the Rhine means a more 
serious shortage elsewhere than would otherwise 
exist. And that shortage exists all over the rest 
of Germany. In the best hotels of Berlin, Mu- 
nich and Leipzig I really suffered from the in- 
sufficiency, the monotony and the poor quality of 
the food. I came out of Germany after only a 
few weeks' stay there hungry and upset in my 
insides. One simply cannot live in health on 
coarse fish and the products of a laboratory of 
organic chemistry. That was the chief content 
of the Berlin menu. 

Without the importation of the foodstuffs now 
being effected through the permission and by the 
provision of the Allies, Germany could not possi- 
bly keep its people alive until autumn. This food 
is, of course, being paid for by the Germans; it 
is not being given them. The shipping that brings 
the food from overseas is German shipping. The 
food relief of Germany and Austria is a commer- 



German Control of Germans 29 

cial transaction, not a dole. The " relief " con- 
sists in the permission to have food, and a certain 
assistance in making it available. But it is a most 
important, an imperatively necessary, relief. It 
keeps the people from starvation and it aids the 
Germans to control themselves. Without it there 
would be anarchy; even with it, anarchy is an 
ever-present possibility. 



CHAPTER III 

WHAT THE BLOCKADE DID TO FOOD 

Under Secretary of State von Braun once 
made a notable little speech during the war in 
which he presented to the Reichstag — and, inci- 
dentally, to the German people and the world — 
the irrefutable facts which proved that Germany 
could not be starved into a break-down, that if 
the Allies were counting on the blockade and the 
food and raw materials shortage to win the war 
they were doomed to bitter disappointment, and, 
finally, that if the Allies did not make an early 
peace with Germany something awful would soon 
happen to them. 

The second official interview that Dr. Taylor 
and I, representing Mr. Hoover and the United 
States Food Administration, had in Berlin in 
February was with Under Secretary of State von 
Braun. On this occasion he made us a notable 
little speech in which he presented the irrefutable 
facts which proved that Germany's break-down 

30 



What the Blockade Did to Food 31 

was due practically entirely to her shortage in 
food and raw materials, and that unless something 
were done quickly to relieve the terrible situation 
in which Germany now found herself she would 
simply explode into revolution and Bolshevist 
anarchy, and the Allies would have to face the 
awful something that such a catastrophe in mid- 
Europe would entail. 

This illustrates one of the difficulties that faced 
those who attempted to learn anything about Ger- 
many's condition before the debacle by listening 
to German declarations about it, and that faces 
those to-day who would try to know something of 
Germany's present condition by taking a German 
official's word for it. Official lying seems to be 
the great German national sport. Under Secre- 
tary of State von Braun lied to the German peo- 
ple and the world when he made his Reichstag 
speech. But that has little importance for us 
now. What does have importance is, how much 
are he and the others lying now when they pretend 
to reveal in all candor the German situation that 
must largely determine the attitude and action that 
the Allies and America have to take toward Ger- 
many now and for some time to come. 



32 Germany in the War and After 

With regard to this I may say at once that I 
think Under Secretary von Braun lied less to us 
in Berlin in February than he lied to the German 
people and the world during the war. We have 
certain extrinsic proofs of this. 

There is no doubt that the blockade did effec- 
tive things to Germany, especially from the early 
part of 19 17 on, that is, since America came into 
the war. By our action toward the neutral states 
contiguous to Germany we helped tighten up the 
blockade to the real pinching point. 

Some of these effective things have been re- 
vealed since Armistice Day. They can be ex- 
pressed in figures; to begin with, certain German 
official figures. This, of course, puts the pre- 
sumption strongly against them. But, strangely, 
they are confirmed by certain German figures 
which we have been able to get unofficially. In 
addition, the American War Trade Board, the 
American military and naval intelligence services 
and our diplomatic representatives in those neu- 
tral countries nearest to Germany and most ac- 
tively in commercial relations with her during the 
war were able to obtain information which was 
not only of important use during the war but is 



What the Blockade Did to Food 33 

now very serviceable in checking up the figures 
that the German Government is presenting to 
make out its case of present need and its plea for 
practical pity. With these figures in our hands, 
Dr. Taylor and I were able to ask pertinent ques- 
tions of the Berlin officials and to correct these 
officials whenever they seemed inclined to dash off 
into the national official sport that I have referred 
to by the ugly word. 

Also certain testimony for the figures is appar- 
ent to the eye in Germany to-day. These things 
seen on the streets are less amenable to expres- 
sion in figures but they have a real value in con- 
nection with any statistical considerations. They 
reveal something of the likelihood or unlikelihood 
of that which the figures purport to prove. 

For example, one sees fewer strongly convex 
Germans now than in the old days. This is an ob- 
vious fact that helps to give reality to the other- 
wise bald and unillustrated statistical statements 
concerning shortages in meat and fats and bread 
and beer. Wooden collars and cuffs, paper shirts 
and skirts and shoes with wooden soles and cloth 
or paper uppers are not articles that one chooses 
to wear when textiles and leather are plentiful. 



34 Germany in the War and After 

But Germans wear them. Nor do the principal 
hotels of Berlin, Munich and Leipzig use paper 
tablecloths and napkins and laboratory-made 
food by predilection or for economy's sake alone. 
The other kinds are simply too scarce. 

But after all we must have recourse to figures 
to make the war-time situation really apparent. 
Let us begin with meat and fats which the block- 
ade, according to von Braun's Reichstag speech, 
was not hitting very hard, and anyway, if it was, 
was not doing much harm to because of the suffi- 
ciency of home production. What is the story 
to-day of the facts of yesterday? 

The Germans are willing, nay, anxious, to ad- 
mit that while before the war not less than 900,000 
tons a year of meats and animal fats were im- 
ported directly or produced by imported concen- 
trated foodstuffs, the 19 17 importations of animal 
fats were only 5,000 tons and the 19 18 (first ten 
months) only 2,000 tons, while the importation 
of concentrated feeding stuffs for the animals was 
cut to one-one-hundredth of the pre-war figures. 
And as a consequence of this effect of the blockade 
and of other meat-limiting conditions the German 
meat ration during the months just preceding the 



What the Blockade Did to Food 35 

Armistice was on the average only 135 grams 
(4^4 oz.) per head per week for the city popu- 
lations, which is just about one-eighth of the aver- 
age pre-war consumption. Also this meat was 
much inferior to the pre-war meat, and the substi- 
tute protein-supplying eggs and fish were not avail- 
able to take its place. The meat-hungry people 
raided the game preserves of the Kaiser, and even 
captured and ate those familiar and famous Berlin 
swans that used to paddle so pridefully and 
Prussianly on the Spree and Havel. 

While the pre-war average annual German con- 
sumption of eggs amounted to 425,000 tons, of 
which 40 per cent, were imported, the war-time 
use of eggs was reduced to an amazing degree. 
In 19 17 the imports of eggs amounted to but 
40,000 tons (instead of the pre-war annual aver- 
age of 170,000 tons) and in 19 18 (first ten 
months) to but 17,250 tons. Also because many 
hens were killed on account of the shortage of 
meat, and there was little grain available to feed 
the ones left alive, the native production of eggs 
was much reduced. In Berlin for several months 
before the Armistice there was but one egg a 
month available per head of the population. 



36 Germany in the War and After 

As to fish, the figures tell a similarly sad story. 
While of the pre-war average annual fish consump- 
tion of 577,000 tons, importations were relied on 
to the extent of about 361,000 tons, these imports 
were cut in 1917 to 161,000 tons and 1918 (first 
ten months) to 97,830 tons. Also the native fish 
catch was greatly lessened. 

Coupled with this shortage in meat, eggs and 
fish was the shortage in butter. During the last 
months before the Armistice the quantity of but- 
ter available in Berlin per week was not more 
than that which had been available per day before 
the war. And there was but little vegetable oil 
and fat to make up for the lack in animal fats. 
There was practically a total stoppage of the im- 
portations which before the war had provided over 
82 per cent, of the 188,500 tons of vegetable oils 
and fats annually used. Of the 1,600,000 tons 
of oleaginous fruits and seeds annually imported 
in pre-war time, but little more than one-one-hun- 
dredth could be imported in 1917. 

Finally, in this group of protein-carrying and 
fatty foods, milk demands a special paragraph. 
Germany was in the unfortunate position of de- 
pending for the production of nearly one-half its 



What the Blockade Did to Food 37 

milk on imported concentrated foodstuffs. As al- 
ready stated, the blockade played havoc with these 
importations. The annual average of 5,180,000 
tons for the years 19 12 and 19 13 was reduced to 
59,000 tons in 19 17 and to 41,000 tons for the 
first ten months of 19 18. The absolute minimum 
milk requirements for Germany are estimated at 
one and three-fourths million liters; in the last 
year of the war there were not more than one and 
one-fourth million liters available. 

All this frightful shortage in meats and animal 
fats made Germany in war time, perforce, a land 
of vegetarians. But rice, after the stocks existing 
at the beginning of the war were used up, was 
practically totally lacking. The importation of 
dried legumes was cut from an annual pre-war 
average of 310,800 tons to 1,708 tons in 1917. 
So on bread and potatoes fell the burden of keep- 
ing the German people alive through the war. 
And they had a thankless task of it. 

In the first place there was not enough of them; 
in the second place, sometimes the potatoes and 
always the bread were of poor quality. The ne- 
cessity of u stretching " the grain by milling it at 
a high percentage — going from the usual 70 per 



38 Germany in the War and After 

cent, first to 72 per cent., then 75 per cent, then 
80 per cent., then 82 per cent., and in the last 
year of the war to 94 per cent. ! — and by mix- 
ing with this high extraction wheat and rye flour 
other meals such as potato, bean, pea, barley, oat, 
and turnip meal, together with finely ground bran, 
resulted in a bread almost unedible for many. 
Even starving people can balk at turnip bread. 
It was indeed the terrible "Kohl-Ruben Zeit" 
(Epoch of Turnips) of late 1916 and early 1917 
that did more to unsettle the German confidence 
in such speeches as von Braun's than anything else. 
It is from that time, when, in the face of a failure 
in the potato crop of 19 16, it was necessary to 
have recourse to the abundant supply of turnips 
to replace lacking potatoes and when these turnips 
were also used as substitutes for many other foods, 
even to the extent of making turnip marmalade 
and turnip coffee, that the increase in mortality 
and morbidity among the German civil population 
appears. Which introduces us to a new set of 
figures, German official figures, it must be con- 
fessed, which we are not in a position at present to 
check up as effectively as we can the figures of 
reduced importations. Indeed we must wish, for 



What the Blockade Did to Food 39 

humanity's sake, that they are, as they probably 
really are, exaggerated. 

In the first place, the malnutrition of the people 
had as consequence a marked reduction in weight. 
Statistics collected from all towns of over 5,000 
population reveal an average loss per person of 
20 per cent, in weight. Losses of even 50 per 
cent, were not rare. The consequences of this 
11 emaciation, caused especially through shortage 
of albuminous foods, were," according to an offi- 
cial report, (1) " reduction of physical and men- 
tal capacity of the individual; his will power and 
mental balance were gravely affected; (2) the re- 
appearance of suppressed or controlled diseases; 
(3) rapid increase of other diseases; (4) irregu- 
larities in female functions and a general tendency 
towards infertility; (5) retarded recovery in all 
cases of illness; (6) marked increase in mortality 
and morbidity, especially among the aged and the 
youth of school age." 

This German official confession of a break- 
down in the mental capacity, will power, and men- 
tal balance — by which it is intended to say also 
moral balance — of the people is probably made 
as an excuse for many wrong things not explicitly 



40 Germany in the War and After 

but implicitly admitted to have been committed 
during the war. It can hardly apply, however, to 
the soldiers themselves, who up to the last mo- 
ment were at least fairly well fed, and for the 
most part of their service very well fed. It must, 
therefore, be offered as an excuse for the tolerance 
and often open approval of the people at home, 
that is, the nation as a whole, of the brutalities and 
crimes committed by the army in Belgium and 
France, and of the unmoral methods of the Ger- 
man rulers and statesmen. 

But there were other peoples who, during the 
war, were living on a minimum life-sustaining ra- 
tion, and who lost weight under it, and were ex- 
posed to all the consequences of malnutrition. 
With all the efforts of the Commission for Relief 
in Belgium, most of the ten million people in Oc- 
cupied Belgium and France — especially France 
— were underfed through all the period of the 
war. Their food shortage began within a few 
months after the war began; Germany's food 
shortage did not begin to be serious until a year 
after theirs. Yet no one would have been less in- 
clined to ascribe to the imprisoned and half- 
starved Belgian people a serious falling-off in 



What the Blockade Did to Food 41 

will power and mental capacity and moral balance, 
in one word, morale, than Governors-General von 
Bissing and von Falkenhausen and their staffs, 
to whom control of the Belgian people was in- 
trusted. The underfed Belgians maintained a 
spirit through all their martyrdom, under all the 
discouragement of continuous bad news — care- 
fully provided whether the real news was bad or 
good — and all the humiliation and privation of 
soup-lines and all the possible hopelessness of re- 
sistance that is beyond words fully to make known. 
On the other hand the underfed Germans had all 
the encouragement of the long period of German 
military successes, and of the continuously ex- 
ploited assurances of ultimate success and an en- 
suing grand orgy of eating, drinking, and being 
merry at the expense of the Allies. 

Yet, after all, it is probably true that the under- 
nutrition of the Germans is in some measure re- 
sponsible for some of their lack of mental and 
moral balance. Especially is it probable that the 
food shortage in the spring and summer of 19 18, 
coupled with their sudden and profound disillu- 
sionment in the autumn, are responsible for much 
of their present hideous surrender of personal con- 



42 Germany in the War and After 

trol. For the disorderly German of to-day is an 
amazing revelation to any one who knew the or- 
derly German of yesterday. 

As to the actual mortality in the civil population 
during the war, and ascribed by the authorities to 
the food shortage, it is declared that while the 
year 19 14 showed no increase over 19 13, there 
was in 19 15 an increase of 9% per cent, over 
1913, in 1916, 14 per cent, in 1917, 32 per cent, 
and in 1918, 37 per cent. The great increase be- 
gan in December, 19 16, in the Kohl-Ruben Zeit. 
These percentages indicate a total number of 
deaths in 19 15-19 18 of nearly 800,000 more 
civilians — the deaths of two million soldiers are 
entirely excluded — than would have died if the 
death rate of 19 13 had remained the annual aver- 
age for the four war years. The increase was 
greatest proportionately in the age group 5 to 
15 years (55 per cent, over the 19 13 rate) and 
next in the 1 to 5 years group (49% per cent, over 
19 13). Tabulated by disease causes, the most 
notable increase was from tuberculosis which, 
from a rate of 16 per 10,000 deaths in 19 12 and 
15 per 10,000 deaths in 19 13, jumped to 18 per 



What the Blockade Did to Food 43 

10,000 in 1916, 25 in 1917, and 27% in 1918, 
or in this last year of the war almost exactly dou- 
ble that of 19 13. 

In the preceding discussion of the food dif- 
ficulties, no reference was made to the situation 
as regards the stimulating drinks, coffee, beer and 
wine, so abundantly used by the Germans in nor- 
mal times, nor to tobacco which is the German's 
sine qua non. All these suffered a sea-change 
early in the war, which became more and more 
accented as the months passed. The coffee was 
not coffee; the tobacco not tobacco; and the beer 
became scarce and thin; German wines were still 
available, at great price, but French wines, certain 
kinds of which are much affected by the Germans 
for their alleged excellent effects on digestion, 
were altogether wanting after the stocks seized 
and stolen in the first months of the war had been 
used up. 

Germany had annually imported about 181,000 
tons of coffee before the war, or about three kilo- 
grams per person. When no more coffee came 
in, recourse was had to many kinds of substitutes. 
Browned grains were first used and were the most 
acceptable, but the grain shortage soon limited 



44 Germany in the War and After 

their use. Other substitutes were made from 
dried and browned figs, sugar beet chips, turnips, 
" and other vegetable garbage," as a German 
official suggestively put it. All these substitutes 
lacked precisely that element, caffeine, that gives 
coffee its stimulating effect, which was an effect 
especially sought for by the underfed people. 

The beer was gradually lessened in amount and 
alcoholic strength. As the demand on all the 
cereals fit for human consumption for use as food, 
chiefly in the form of bread, was so imperative, 
only very small quantities of them could be as- 
signed to the brewers for beer-making. This 
quantity got to be as low as 5 per cent, of the pre- 
war quantity so used. 

As for tobacco, all sorts of unsatisfactory sub- 
stitutes were resorted to. Among them were hop 
flowers, the foliage of various trees, pine needles, 
and the leaves of a curiously large variety of other 
plants. I remember trying a certain one of these 
tobacco substitutes called Kriegs-Mischung with 
most uncomfortable results. As a matter of fact, 
not a little illness was caused by smoking certain 
of these substitutes, especially beech-leaves. 



CHAPTER IV 

OTHER INSIDE DIFFICULTIES DURING THE WAR 

If the blockade and general war situation made 
the difficulties of food supply so serious that their 
steady cumulation, as time passed, tended plainly 
to inevitable disaster, no less can be said of the 
difficulties in the supply of raw materials for cloth- 
ing and footwear and for the necessary industries, 
and the difficulties in coal supply and railway 
transportation. It was all very well to tell the 
world that paper shirts and skirts were quite as 
comfortable as woolen and cotton ones, and that 
wooden soles and near-leather uppers made shoes 
good enough for anybody, that copper was easily 
replaceable by mysterious new alloys abundantly 
available, and that the German coal supply was 
undiminished, and the railways functioning under 
the all-efficient military control with unusual per- 
fection, but it was quite another thing to face 
actually living these lies indefinitely. 

" American bluff " never dared such dizzy 
45 



46 Germany in the War and After 

heights as the Germans easily rose to in the latter 
years of the war. But bluff cannot too long sub- 
stitute for reality, and this particular German 
bluff was simply another disappointing Ersatz. 

When I first arrived in Belgium, in June, 19 15, 
and was soon after assigned to the relief work 
in occupied France, I used to travel between 
Brussels and my post at Great Headquarters in 
Charleville on the German military trains of 
which several a day regularly made the five hours' 
journey. In the summer and autumn of 19 15 
these trains left Brussels (or Charleville) always 
promptly on the minute and arrived at destination 
equally promptly on the minute. They were 
composed of first-class corridor cars in excellent 
condition, clean, well-lighted and, when winter 
came, well-heated. There was a dining car and 
buffet car for the single meal or mid-meals drink- 
ing that the German officers enjoyed on the jour- 
ney. Everything was efficient and comfortable. 

But this did not last. As the months passed, 
the trains lessened in number, the coaches became 
jumpy as to wheels and ragged as to upholstering, 
the lights faded to sputtering and then into gloomy 
darkness, the dining car and the food and drink 



Other Inside Difficulties 47 

disappeared, and instead of starting and arriving 
on schedule time there was delay in getting away, 
interruptions along the journey, and utter uncer- 
tainty as to time of arrival except that it would 
be hours after the scheduled moment. Yet these 
were military trains with preferential treatment 
as to equipment and personnel. What must have 
been the joys or comforts or reliability of civilian 
trains inside Germany? 

But more convincing than personal impressions 
are the statistics now available. During the 
month of January, 19 14, the railways of Prussia 
handled promptly and efficiently 219,000 loaded 
freight cars a day; in January, 19 18, they han- 
dled neither promptly nor efficiently 146,700 
freight cars, and in January of this year (19 19) 
only 105,200, or slightly less than 50 per cent, 
of the pre-war number. As to passenger cars, no 
figures are available, but they would show far 
greater differences. To keep a nation alive and 
of the character of a going concern, it is much 
more important to move freight than passengers. 
In January, 19 19, at which time the situation can- 
not have been much worse- than in the last months 
before the Armistice, the passenger express trains 



48 Germany in the War and After 

of Germany were but three per cent, of the pre- 
war normal; the total passenger trains but 35 
per cent, of the normal, and the total freight trains 
but 42 per cent, of the normal. 

The chief reason for the break-down in trans- 
portation was the scarcity of copper, tin, nickel, 
asbestos, cotton and rubber. The German loco- 
motive has a copper fire-box. When copper was 
no longer available for this purpose, iron fire-boxes 
were put in when , replacement was necessary. 
These could not stand the heat and went to pieces 
quickly. The lack of tin added to the lack of 
copper left available only lead, zinc, and aluminum 
with which to make friction metals. The best 
combinations which the Germans were able to per- 
fect would stand neither the friction itself nor the 
generated heat well, nor did they lubricate prop- 
erly. In addition, the only available lubricating 
oils themselves were of poor quality. The result 
was that bearings had to be often replaced in the 
journals and hot boxes were of daily occurrence 
on almost every moving train. The absence of 
cotton, asbestos, rubber and copper made itself 
keenly felt when it came to trying to make con- 
nections water- and steam-tight. None of the 



Other Inside Difficulties 49 

substitutes for brass and asbestos stood up, and 
engines had to be frequently sent in for repair 
simply for leaks alone. The number of engines 
in the shops for these repairs in pre-war times 
was never beyond 13 per cent, of those being used; 
by the end of 1 9 1 7 it had reached 33 per cent, and 
in January, 19 19, it was 43 per cent. 

Altogether, the deterioration of rolling stock 
and the difficulties of repair because of deficiency 
in materials and man-power must have been a tre- 
mendous handicap on the German effort to main- 
tain even their minimum necessity of transporta- 
tion in the latter period of the war. 

The coal shortage further added to the general 
transportation difficulties. In addition it mili- 
tated against the effectiveness of all war-time in- 
dustry except actual government-controlled war 
industries themselves, for it was to these industries 
and to strictly military transportation that the 
available coal was first allocated. The lack of 
coal for other than the war industries had, too, 
a depressing and even seriously injurious effect 
on the people as a whole in their unheated 
homes, shops, offices, and public gathering places. 
The cold was especially felt in connection with the 



50 Germany in the War and After 

lowered food ration and insufficient supply of 
warm clothing. 

These discomforts of the people for lack of 
sufficient coal were real, but an examination of the 
available statistics of coal production in Germany 
during the four years of war reveals the interest- 
ing fact that there was practically no falling off in 
the number of tons of coal annually mined. For 
example, while the production in 19 13 was 
278,000,000 tons, the imports 18,000,000 tons, 
and the exports 44,000,000 tons, the correspond- 
ing figures for 19 18 are, 275,000,000, 100,000, 
and 16,000,000. This last item of 16,000,000 
tons exported in 19 18 despite the urgent home 
need requires explanation. But there is a simple 
and sufficient one. Germany had to take that 
much coal out of the amount it could possibly have 
devoted to keeping its people more comfortable, in 
order to send it to contiguous neutrals in exchange 
for certain absolutely necessary supplies of neu- 
tral origin, an exchange which the Allied blockade 
could not wholly prevent. 

Immediately after Armistice Day, however, 
when governmental internal control fell down and 
strikes were the order of the day, the coal pro- 



Other Inside Difficulties 51 

duction went off rapidly. In January and Febru- 
ary of this year the output of the great Ruhr dis- 
trict had fallen from the normal of 300,000 to 
310,000 tons a day to quantities fluctuating be- 
tween 150,000 to 260,000 tons a day. And the 
Silesian normal output of from 120,000 to 130,- 
000 tons a day had fallen to from 32,000 to 60,000 
tons a day. The official estimates for the whole 
of Germany put the production of bituminous coal 
in January and February, 19 19, at from 50 per 
cent, to 60 per cent, of normal. And since that 
time the output percentage has fallen still lower. 
It is interesting to note, as showing the close 
commercial and economic inter-relation among the 
adjacent countries of Europe that the people in 
Switzerland, Holland and Denmark were but lit- 
tle less cold and uncomfortable in the war winters, 
because of the coal situation in Germany, than the 
Germans themselves. For while Germany was 
able, or, better, really had to keep up a certain 
export of coal to these countries this export was 
much less than normal. The 16,000,000 tons 
sent out in 19 18, and the 19,000,000 tons sent 
out in 19 17 were much less than the pre-war nor- 
mal as indicated by the figure of 44,000,000 tons 



52 Germany in the War and After 

in 19 13. Not all of the pre-war export went to 
those countries which in the war were known as 
the contiguous neutrals, but a large part did. 
Switzerland and Holland and Denmark gave up 
hot water baths and heated theaters and warm 
houses to about the same degree as Germany did. 
There is a pertinent significance in this fact to be 
taken into account in connection with all attempts 
to picture European conditions as they will be 
effected by a broken or continually restless and 
upheaving Germany. 

The blockade and the large withdrawal of man- 
power from those native sources of raw materials 
which were not actually necessary for munitions 
and other strictly war supplies, combined to effect 
to an impressive degree a curtailment of the raw 
materials needed for German industry and of the 
substances commonly used by the people as every- 
day necessities. 

The blockade almost entirely cut off the needed 
importations of cotton, wool, jute, rubber, silk, 
and the metals already referred to. This was 
especially true for the period 1917-1918; the 
blockade was not so effective before that time. It 
is reliably estimated that Germany managed to 



Other Inside Difficulties 53 

get in, in the three years 19 16-19 18, not more 
than 2 per cent, of her normal importations of 
cotton. What an aching want of cotton this re- 
veals. 

Even as early as the fall of 19 15 the cotton 
substitutes were making their appearance. My 
Headquarters escort officer and I stopped one day 
in that autumn at Montmedy, at that time the 
headquarters of the Crown Prince's army. In a 
hospital there I was shown a fluffy white substance 
which was being used as bandage and sponge ma- 
terial instead of cotton. It was made from the 
bark of pine trees. It was soft and absorbent 
and not a bad substitute for cotton in the particu- 
lar use to which it was being put. But it was not 
something that, as my officer proudly put it, " had 
solved the cotton problem." It was only making 
it very clear that there was already, after one year 
of war, a serious cotton problem in Germany. 

Germany obtained all through the war a certain 
amount of iron ore from Sweden. And her early 
seizure of the French Lorraine iron basin gave her 
an important source of steel supply. But little of 
this steel was available for any but strictly war 
purposes. In peace time the steel outturn of the 



54 Germany in the War and After 

great Krupp factories for civil purposes is about 
90 per cent.; during the war 90 per cent, of its 
outturn went for strictly war materials. 

Scarcity of such a simple homely article as soap 
can work great discomfort and hardship ; indeed 
it can be a serious menace to good health and to 
personal morale. In time of peace about 400,000 
tons of the fats and oils available in Germany 
were used annually for technical purposes, above 
all for the manufacture of soap. Because of the 
blockade not only the greater part of the fat im- 
ports ceased, but it became necessary to use for 
human alimentation all kinds of domestic fats, in 
so far as they could be adapted by processes of 
refining, for that purpose. In November, 19 15, 
it was forbidden to use for technical purposes any 
fats suitable for human consumption. 

By the spring of 19 16 the fats available for 
soap making were so scarce as to make controlled 
restriction and the use of soap substitutes neces- 
sary. While in pre-war times about ten kilograms 
of laundry and toilet soap had been used annually 
per person, a ration of only 250 grams a month 
of wash-powder, containing only 4 per cent, of 
fat, could be allowed for laundry use, and of one 



Other Inside Difficulties 55 

cake of toilet soap of 50 grams consisting to the 
extent of about three-quarters of clay. In Janu- 
ary, 19 1 8, the wash-powder ration was reduced to 
125 grams a month. " Many attempts to replace 
soap by fatless washing substances were made, but 
these preparations proved quite unsuitable for 
bodily use, and of a limited utility only for laun- 
dry purposes." The quotation is German official. 

This last quoted sentence invites a few further 
remarks on the subject of Ersatze (substitutes), 
a word which all through the war was a word of 
boasting and now has become a special word of 
confession and whining. The truth is that the 
substitutes didn't substitute. The vaunted Ger- 
man science and ingenuity simply could not make 
the needed bricks without straw. Speaking of 
the shortage of leather and textiles for clothing, 
the German authorities admit to-day that, despite 
all attempts, " we have not succeeded up to the 
present day (January, 19 19) in supplying the civil 
population with a single really useful substitute 
[for leather or textiles]. The paper textures 
that appeared on the market were, without count- 
ing their high prices, a disappointment." 

And the testimony, both official and unofficial 



56 Germany in the War and After 

expert, is the same with regard to substitutes for 
the usual foods and metals, as well as for leather 
and the textiles. Some of these were useless when 
made; others more usable cost so much in time, 
materials, and labor as to be unpracticable. The 
leading scientific men of Germany with whom we 
talked admitted this; the people in the street ad- 
mitted it with less hesitation and in terms of no 
dubiety. The number of these substitutes ran 
into the thousands ; they turn out to have been prac- 
tically that many disappointments. 



CHAPTER V 

HOW THE PEOPLE WERE DECEIVED 

These revelations of the actual internal difficul- 
ties of Germany during the war help explain why 
imperial Germany broke. That the actual col- 
lapse was immediately the result of the decisive 
military victories of the Allies in the late summer 
and autumn of 191 8, should not prevent us from 
recognizing that the break-down behind the lines, 
the internal collapse which would itself have ended 
the war even in the face of a purely military stale- 
mate, was certain to come in the spring of 19 19. 
Despite Under Secretary of State von Braun's 
declaration to us in February that the collapse of 
Germany was caused solely, or chiefly, by the " il- 
legal, inhuman, monstrous blockade " — how mon- 
strous, incredible, illegal and inhuman things are 
when the other fellow is doing them ! — he knows 
that this is not true. Germany could have stag- 
gered on until her 19 18 harvest was used up, and, 
with her armies holding in the west, she would 

57 



58 Germany in the War and After 

have done it; although in fact it would have been 
only a hopeless staggering, and her few informed 
people knew it. But the end really came by a 
white flag from the General Staff, not the general 
public. The people were still holding out, amaz- 
ing, in the light of what we now know, as it is. 

Indeed it is no less than a wonder that Germany 
was able to go on for as long as she did. And 
Germany herself now wonders how she was able 
to do it. The explanation is chiefly one of psy- 
chology, of the official and the self-deception of 
nearly a whole people, and of an almost super- 
human endurance of an almost impossible situ- 
ation on the basis of the promise, and a blind faith 
in this promise, of an early cessation of the situ- 
ation and a complete compensation for the suffer- 
ings endured. A few Germans saw some time 
before the break, the reality of things and the 
certain disaster that impended from this reality. 
The principal organic chemist, the principal statis- 
tician and the principal agricultural expert of Ger- 
many told Dr. Taylor and me that they knew, a 
year before the end, that Germany was doomed. 
But these wise Germans were few and they had to 
keep silent. The two or three who did try to 



How the People Were Deceived 59 

speak up either got quickly out of the country, or 
into prison. If there was freedom of anything in 
Germany during the war, it was not freedom of 
speech. 

One of the most revealing books concerning the 
internal situation in Germany during the war time 
is Kurt Muehsam's " Wie Wir Belogen Warden" 
a fully documented account of " the official decep- 
tion of the German people " by means of the press 
control. The book was published in Munich as 
soon after the Armistice as it could be put through 
the press. It is a book of damning revelation of 
German official lying, German official stupidity and 
German official culpable ignorance of facts, and, 
more important, of the significance of facts known. 
It helps reveal the singularly artificial character 
of the control of the German nation by the rulers 
of Germany, a control to which, nevertheless, the 
mass of the people from ignorant peasants to most 
erudite of professors submitted tamely for amaz- 
ingly long. 

Muehsam lays bare by actual citation and quo- 
tation the whole censor system, absurd in its at- 
tempt to controvert all truth, criminal in its suc- 
cess of hiding sufficient truth to wreck the nation. 



60 Germany in the War and After 

It was a system that went far beyond saying what 
truth might not be printed, for it included saying 
what untruth should be told. 

For example, to show its attitude towards a sin- 
gle critically important matter, on May 17, 19 18, 
the official news agency gave out for publication 
in all the newspapers a statement that " the num- 
ber of American fighting troops in France is, ac- 
cording to reliable official information, to be esti- 
mated at about ten divisions — only four of these 
are at the front. The total of all those back of 
the lines as well as in them is at the most from 
150,000 to 200,000 men. Press notices concern- 
ing these facts should state, therefore, that Amer- 
ica has not been able to meet its expectations in the 
way of sending troops, and the earlier estimates 
of the German General Staff as to what America 
could do have proved to be true. However, 
in order not to let the enemy know how well 
informed we are, the actual figures given 
above should under no circumstances be men- 
tioned! " 

Now as a matter of fact there were at the time 
this was given out to the German press nearly one 
million American troops in France. Was the 



How the People Were Deceived 61 

General Staff just lying or was it just ignorant of 
the facts ? The latter supposition is almost incon- 
ceivable. In any event the giving out of this 
false information to the German people was both 
stupid and criminal. 

In a remarkable " Censor Book " issued in 
March, 19 17, general instructions including ex- 
plicit prohibitions and recommendations were 
given concerning the press treatment of a long 
series of subjects arranged alphabetically and run- 
ning all the way from " Aalandfrage " to " Zen- 
surmassnahmen" These presumably permanent 
instructions were added to a thousandfold by the 
special instructions issued constantly by a so- 
called " Press Conferenz," which, beginning in 
19 14 with weekly sittings, soon became an almost 
continuously sitting institution, and in addition by 
other confidential detailed instructions with re- 
gard to particular matters of the minute which 
were constantly issued by no less than a score of 
separate official bureaus and war offices. 

The Censor Book, under the head " Lebens- 
mittel," forbade the publication of any declara- 
tions or suppositions that " our economic hold- 
ing out may not be possible." It also forbade the 



62 Germany in the War and After 

comic papers from making the food shortage the 
subject of jests. 

Under " Zensurmassnahmen " it was forbidden 
to print any news concerning any measures taken 
to enforce the censorship ! In a word, in the face 
of, and by means of what was notoriously the 
most radical and criminal censorship ever insti- 
tuted it was attempted to cover up the fact of any 
censorship at all. 

On September 22, 19 14, just after the first bat- 
tle of the Marne, the " Press Conferenz " gave 
out to the newspapers and the people of Germany 
the following announcement : 

" The general military situation in the West is 
good. No retreat or backward push has taken 
place as a result of any tactical advantage of the 
enemy. Our movements were entirely of stra- 
tegic nature for the preparation of new successes 
and were not forced by the enemy." 

On the next day this general thesis was repeated 
with certain interesting additions — amazingly 
absurd additions, as a matter of fact — one of 
them being a prohibition to the press to say any- 
thing about the backward movement of the Ger- 
man troops " in order that the enemy may be left 



How the People Were Deceived 63 

in his present embarrassing great uncertainty " 
about these movements ! 

When the Luxburg " Versenkt ohne Spur " af- 
fair was a few days old, the worried Berlin For- 
eign Office issued a rather petulant special instruc- 
tion to the press to the effect that although the 
Entente was continuing to publish new telegrams 
the Foreign Office wished all references to the 
Luxburg affair to " disappear from the German 
press once and for all." On INjiarch 16, 19 17, 
the press was given the statement that the in- 
juries to the German ships in American harbors 
had been successfully accomplished. " For exam- 
ple, the giant steamer Vaterland had been made 
completely unusable for America." On July 27, 
19 17, the press was notified that it should refer 
to Russia as still a brave antagonist. " The suc- 
cesses of our troops are much depreciated if our 
press continues to speak of the Russian Army as 
without strength or power of resistance " ; which 
was exactly its condition at this time. 

On August 29, 19 1 8, a long instruction to the 
press was issued announcing the retirement from 
the Marne for ten to twelve kilometers of Boehn's 
Army, but forbidding any immediate publication 



64 Germany in the War and After 

of the fact. The news was told the press so that 
preparation could be made " if the Entente should 
announce this retreat as a great success, as was 
probable," to meet " the urgent necessity through 
the press of creating a proper understanding and 
of quieting the public." It was further stated 
to the press that the Marne operations had re- 
sulted in a failure both on the German and En- 
tente sides to carry out the planned movements 
but " in any discussion of the situation the failure 
on the German side is not to be mentioned while 
that of the Entente is to be strongly brought out 
and emphasized.' ' 

But we cannot dig farther into this mine of 
decaying " blood and iron." The odor is too re- 
pellent. This is not simply censorship; it is pre- 
meditated official deception of a whole people. 
The German authorities cannot have understood 
the great risk in it. They seemed to have be- 
lieved that if they could carry on for the day, the 
morrow could be met when it came. 

We know censorship, and do not like it; and 
so do the English and the French people know it 
and dislike it. One country may make use of it 
more than another. But there is more than a 



How the People Were Deceived 65 

quantitative difference between the censorships we 
know and this German one ; there is a qualitative 
difference. One country may not allow its news- 
papers to print the enemy communiques. The 
German newspapers had to print them with ad- 
ditions or subtractions that made them tell, as of 
enemy origin, the lies that the German authorities 
wished to tell their people. The official deception 
of the German people by the German rulers 
through all the long war agony was not the least 
of the crimes of imperial Germany, nor was it the 
least of the means whereby the German nation 
was led to ruin. 



CHAPTER VI 

WHAT THE GERMANS THOUGHT DURING THE 
WAR AND ARMISTICE 

The press is reputed to be the voice of the 
people, and many of us read the German news- 
papers assiduously through the war and armistice 
period in the hope of learning just what the Ger- 
man people were thinking and saying. But 
Muehsam has shown us that during the war pe- 
riod, at least, it was their masters' voice, not their 
own, that came from the printing presses. It was 
in truth a gramaphone we were hearing reading 
out from the prepared records the dictations of 
General Staff, Foreign Office, Press Conferenz, 
and all the rest. So despite an occasional revela- 
tion in Die Zukunft, Berliner Tageblatt, Leipziger 
V olkstimme } Munchner Post, and similar socialist 
or liberal journals, which preferred to accept an 
occasional suppression rather than be completely 
tongue-tied as regards truth-speaking, we learned 
little from the German press of what the German 

66 



What the Germans Thought 67 

people were thinking or were saying among them- 
selves in whispers. 

But there were a few Americans in such situ- 
ations as enabled them to hear the actual voices 
of some of the German people. Mr. Gerard in 
Berlin and Mr. Whitlock in occupied Brussels 
heard something of what the government officials 
had to say in moments when they were not too 
consciously speaking to the public, and I had 
some unusual opportunities at Great Headquar- 
ters in 19 15 and 19 16 to hear an occasional 
straight word from the staff officers with whom I 
necessarily came into contact. Also I heard oc- 
casionally some even straighter words from the 
orderlies of these officers and from petty officers 
and soldiers at the Headquarters. One thing was 
noticeable ; the speech of the orderlies and soldiers 
while in the earlier months of the war as vain- 
glorious as that of the officers, grew to be differ- 
ent, even very different. 

Their letters from home made impressions on 
them that their simple minds could not but reflect. 
And these impressions did not make for happiness 
or boasting. They learned that things were go- 
ing badly at home; that their wives and children 



68 Germany in the War and After 

were suffering even though no foreign foe was 
burning their houses, looting their shops, pos- 
sessing their fields or outraging their women. 
And these orderlies and soldiers, many of them 
at least, were not too long in understanding that 
while the army was winning victories, Germany 
was not winning the war, certainly not, at least, 
with the rapidity that had been assured them. 

I remember one old Landsturmer who, in his 
capacity of guard at a little bridge, stopped my 
motor to examine my pass. He had just heard 
of the break in diplomatic relations between Ger- 
many and America, and misunderstood it to be 
the American declaration of war. 

" So," he grunted, " you are going to fight us. 
Well, I'm glad. You will win, and that will end 
it. We want it to end." 

During 19 15 every one at Headquarters — ex- 
cept the unfortunate French villagers of the town 
and the neutral Americans of the Relief Commis- 
sion — was radiant and boastful. It was taking 
a little more time and exertion to make the win- 
ning than had been counted on, but victory was 
certain; it was almost in sight. And this feeling 
lasted until the first of July, 19 16. The officers 



What the Germans Thought 69 

I had to be with were almost unendurable in their 
high spirits, their strutting and boasting, their 
insolent references to America's hold-off policy — 
easily explained by our cowardice and selfishness. 
But one day in the first week of July, 19 16, on a 
trip of inspection of the relief work, on which an- 
other American of the Relief Commission and 
myself were escorted by three German officers of 
the Headquarters Staff, we pushed as far west as 
Coucy le Chateau where we opened our luncheon 
baskets at the foot of the noble tower of the old 
chateau ruins. They were not the utter ruins, 
it may be remarked in parentheses, that they are 
now. 

As we munched our war-bread and Leberwurst 
we heard the constant rumble of a heavy cannon- 
ading along the front to our west. It even inter- 
rupted our conversation. That is, the officers oc- 
casionally and rather nervously checked them- 
selves in mid-sentence to glance at each other and 
mutter, " Heavy, unusually heavy; the damned 
English are getting more wasteful." Talk about 
the history of the chateau and the German vic- 
tories in the east faded away. They were too 
much interested in the significant rumble. 



70 Germany in the War and After 

So after luncheon we climbed the long spiral 
stair in the tower wall to the summit to see what 
we could of what was going on. We had a most 
extended panorama of the West Front all the way 
from Noyon to Soissons. All along this line there 
was the smoke of bursting heavy shells; it was 
really a bombardment on a grand scale ; an enor- 
mous quantity of shell was being hurled into the 
German lines by hundreds of heavy cannon. If 
it were not the prelude of an extensive serious of- 
fensive, it was at any rate a proof that the Allies 
had finally succeeded in so developing their mu- 
nitions output that they could play with equal ex- 
travagance the German game of artillery prepara- 
tion and offensive. 

Our officers did not like the looks of it. They 
became gloomy, grouchy. We made the long 
journey back to Headquarters mostly in silence. 
And that evening at dinner and after when the 
news of what was really going on at the front had 
come in by radio and telegraph and telephone, 
for there was much of it, they began whining. 
" How can we expect to win with America fur- 
nishing the Allies enormous quantities of muni- 
tions? What can we do with all the world against 



What the Germans Thought 71 

us? Why is this universal hate of Germany? " 
It was an amazing change from the boasting of 
the day and days before. And it all came from 
the first day's artillery preparation for the first 
Somme offensive — from that and from the yel- 
low streak that the buttoned-up field-gray blouses 
had up to now concealed from view. 

After July, 19 16, the tide of war ebbed and 
flowed, and as it changed the German officers 
boasted or whined. When the fateful day in 
19 17 came on which America broke off diplo- 
matic relations with Germany, the German Gen- 
eral Staff had a shock. It was very angry ; angry 
with America and angry with " the stupid pigs " 
of statesmen and diplomats in Berlin who had al- 
lowed matters to come to such a pass. But they 
had certain hopes. Baron von der Lancken, po- 
litical head of von Bissing's government of Bel- 
gium, said to me on the afternoon of my last day 
in Brussels — it was in the middle of March three 
weeks before we were at war with Germany: 
" This is a sad state of affairs ; we should never 
have allowed it to come about. Of course, it 
means war. But I cannot believe that there will 
ever be such feeling or such war between America 



72 Germany in the War and After 

and Germany as exists between England and Ger- 
many. We may, indeed, may we not, hope for a 
more platonic war? " 

There is no doubt that the Germans believed 
we should never really enter the war against them. 
We had waited so long; they had already done 
so many things to us that Germany would never 
have tolerated having us do to them that 
they had put us down as too cowardly and selfish 
to spend lives and money in war against them. 
We were safe over there across the ocean. And 
we were making money in provisioning the Allies 
with food and material. The German General 
Staff and Berlin were sure we would never come 
in, and the German people were sure of it because 
they were told so over and over again by the men 
who knew. 

And then after we were in they were told over 
and over again that we would not count. The in- 
structions to the German press about our troop 
landings, quoted in the last chapter, are examples 
of this. At first the General Staff really believed 
that we would not count seriously; they relied on 
our unpreparedness, our lack of a trained army, 
and the enormous difficulty, even with free use of 



What the Germans Thought 73 

the ocean, of carrying overseas a sufficiently large 
force with continuing necessities in the way of 
food and munitions in great quantity; and then 
there was the increased difficulty of doing this in 
face of submarine attack to count on; and finally 
they were sure that even if we were able to get 
over at all we could not do it in time to save the 
situation. 

But first the General Staff, and then, gradually 
and despite all attempts to prevent it, the people, 
learned the disturbing news of the American 
coming to France. From the German soldiers on 
the West Front who began to meet American sol- 
diers all up and down the line and to learn by 
sad experience their eagerness and unmistakable 
capacity for fighting, the news got back to the 
people. And the realization of what this Ameri- 
can coming really meant, and the bitterness at the 
deception that had covered it up were not con- 
ducive to strengthening the hold on the people, 
in these increasingly difficult days, of the German 
court and military rulers. 

As I have said, we were told in Berlin in Febru- 
ary of this year by three of the best known scien- 
tific men of Germany that they knew long before 



74 Germany in the War and After 

the break-down came that it was inevitable. 
When we asked these men why they had not cried 
this aloud to the people, so as to save further 
bloodshed and national exhaustion, they said sim- 
ply: " We should not have been heard. At first 
the people would not have believed us, and before 
we could make them believe we should have dis- 
appeared, either in prison or as refugees forced 
to escape from the country. Remember Nicolai 
and Forster and Muehlon.' , 

It is true that Germany was no place in 19 17 
and 19 1 8 for truth-telling. Muehlon, the ex-di- 
rector of Krupp's, had fled to Switzerland for 
speaking out some unpalatable truths. We saw 
him in Berne a few weeks after the Armistice. 
He was interesting himself in the possibility of 
obtaining food relief for Germany, and had a 
moving tale to tell of the serious situation. He 
saw the food control disappearing and at the same 
time the food stocks also going. Spring would 
bring the people face to face with starvation. But 
even as he revealed the desperate brokenness of 
Germany, and asked for help, he flashed out now 
and then with characteristic German insolence, a 
boast or a challenge. 



What the Germans Thought J$ 

" You must be careful," he declared; "you 
must not treat Germany too hard; you cannot 
push us too far. The world must reckon with 
Germany's intrinsic greatness; it must not over- 
look the importance of her Kultur, her science 
and her art; the world will always need Ger- 
many." 

And then with equally characteristic naivete and 
utter lack of comprehension of the realities ex- 
ternal to himself and Germany he asked — and 
this only a month after the bloody fighting in the 
Argonne — if we did not think it an auspicious 
time to institute a propaganda among the chil- 
dren of America to collect funds for the feeding 
of the children of Germany, as we of the C.R.B. 
had done so successfully in earlier days for Bel- 
gium! 

That is one of the difficult things in understand- 
ing the thoughts and talk of the people and of the 
rulers of Germany since the end of the fighting 
period. They themselves do not understand the 
thoughts of other peoples about Germany and 
German ways. And hence German thinking and 
expression since Armistice Day are based on ac- 
cepted premises concerning their own position and 



j6 Germany in the War and After 

concerning our position that we cannot understand 
as acceptable. 

We believe that Germany was beaten in a mili- 
tary way and that her military leaders so fully 
recognized this as to lead them to know that the 
only means of saving their armies from complete 
slaughter or complete surrender as prisoners was 
to ask for an armistice ; which was, in effect, an ac- 
knowledgment of defeat but an escape from the full 
consequences of defeat. But the German people 
as a whole do not by any means share this belief. 

Returning from Berlin to Paris in February I 
found myself alone in a compartment on the train 
from Cologne to Spa with a German locomotive 
engineer on his way to help advise the German 
armistice commission about the delivery of rail- 
way engines and cars to the Allies. He was an 
unusually intelligent man, or seemed so, and was 
very frank in his talk. 

We were discussing the German revolution. 
He agreed that it was a good thing for Germany; 
it had to come ; the old regime had to go ; the time 
had certainly come for it to go. 

" But," he added, " what a pity they didn't put 
off the revolution a little longer." 



What the Germans Thought JJ 

"Why? "I asked. 

11 Why, because we should have won the war 
soon, and then we should have been in so much 
better shape. You know, we were not beaten in 
a military way. It was just our break-down be- 
hind the lines." 

And he then, unintentionally, gave some proof 
of the conditions " behind the lines," when he 
paid ten marks to a passing Scots soldier for a 
cake of Sunlight soap. The occupying troops 
along the Rhine can pay many bills with a few 
bars of soap. That is one thing the blockade did. 

But the idea that Germany was not beaten by 
arms is not limited to the man in the street. In 
a speech before the National Assembly at Wei- 
mar, a Minister of the Majority Socialist govern- 
ment was interrupted by clamorous approval when 
he declared : " We were not beaten ; we gave up." 

For the sake of stopping further bloodshed in 
Europe, and to end the privation and suffering of 
the civil population of Germany, the unbeaten 
army of Germany " gave up " ! 

So all through the armistice period while the 
German people knew that they were badly broken, 
that their industries were almost at a standstill, 



yS Germany in the War and After 

that they had not enough food to eat, with a 
prospect of having less before their 19 19 harvest 
came in, that their rail transportation was so mis- 
erably insufficient that a simple journey from Ber- 
lin to Munich was to be looked on as an under- 
taking of such difficulty and discomfort as to be 
avoided unless absolutely necessary, that their coal 
supply was so reduced that they must get on with 
little heat and light, that they must wear paper 
clothing and wooden shoes, and that for all of 
this there could be no relief except by the benevo- 
lence of their enemies or by the fear of these 
enemies that a too-miserable Germany might be 
a danger to the stability of their own governments 
— despite all this, the German people would not 
accept the knowledge that their armies had been 
beaten by the armies of the Entente. Their sol- 
diers had stopped fighting for reasons of discretion 
but they had come home unconquered. It re- 
quired the hard terms of armistice and peace that 
followed and annihilated these armies within the 
very heart of their untouched country to shake the 
confidence of the Germans in their delusion. 



CHAPTER VII 

GERMANY NOW AND TO-MORROW 

The peace has come ! Seven months have 
passed since Armistice Day. The material condi- 
tions of Germany have not changed much in this 
time ; certainly they have not changed much for the 
better. Some food has gone into the country — 
and has been eaten as rapidly as it arrived. Some 
commercial agents of various countries, enemy 
as well as neutral, have arrived, but the arrange- 
ments with them are, at best, tentative. The out- 
come of these arrangements depends on various 
variables, the final influence of any one of which 
can only be guessed at now. The commercial 
blockade has been maintained; the slight relaxa- 
tion of it has only been for the sake of keeping 
the people alive, not for the sake of beginning 
Germany's industrial rehabilitation. The out- 
standing interest and activity of the seven months 
since last November have been political; struggle 
for and against the government set up by the 

79 



80 Germany in the War and After 

Revolution; intriguing and fighting by Independ- 
ent Socialists and Spartacists; watchful waiting 
and subterranean mining by Royalists and reac- 
tionaries; thoughtful weighing of advantages and 
chances by Separatists in Bavaria and the Rhine- 
land and elsewhere. There has been little ac- 
complished along lines other than political. In- 
deed, under the circumstances, with the peace set- 
tlement always hanging fire, there could be little. 
Only politics can be played to much advantage 
in such a situation. So politics — and finding 
something to eat — have been the German pre- 
occupations of the last half year. 

But it is of importance to us, and even more 
to that part of the world nearer Germany, to know 
all that can be known of Germany's actual ma- 
terial condition to-day. We need to know this to 
know what Germany can do and to guess at what 
she is really going to do to-morrow. For despite 
all the drastic conditions of the Versailles peace 
Germany is not dismembered, not extinguished. 
She is a living nation of sixty million people with 
a tradition and habit of hard work, of inter- 
national commercial relations, of highly developed 
industry based on scientific method, attention to 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 81 

detail and disregard of morals; in a word, bent on 
success as an industrial and commercial competi- 
tor of other nations. 

German business men and commercial experts, 
between expressions of horror, indignation and 
profanity concerning the peace requirements, have 
taken pen in hand to write reassuring articles in 
Berlin and Frankfort newspapers about Ger- 
many's business opportunities in the future. Al- 
though Germany has not won political domina- 
tion of Eastern Europe she can still count on com- 
mercial domination of it, say these German busi- 
ness men. Her goods and her trade are as es- 
sential to Poland and Russia and the Balkans as 
they ever were, or as they could ever be even 
with political control over these countries. These 
peoples have to have Germany; let us get the 
peace and let them get their boundaries fixed and 
their governments going, and then we can go 
after their business. We may have lost the war 
for the ownership of the East, but we have not lost 
our opportunity for commercial domination of 
it. The countries and the backward peoples are 
still there, these pastoral and agricultural folk 
who have to get their manufactured things and 



$2 Germany in the War and After 

fertilizers and dyes and medicines and all the rest 
from outside their boundaries. They have to 
have Germany just as much as, and perhaps more 
than, ever. That is the kind of comfort in these 
sore hours of surprise, dismay, indignation and 
vituperation, that not a few German traders have 
been able to find. 

Well, it is encouraging comfort for us, too. 
For we prefer to see Germany planning commer- 
cial conquest rather than military conquest. We 
do not like fighting so much, despite our taste of 
success in it, that we want to go at it again soon. 
And Germany planning to trade with the Balkans 
is not disquieting to us; and ought not to be for 
anybody else. Only let Germany stick to trade 
this time — and forget Berlin to Bagdad. 

In the meantime what is Germany's situation 
at this time of making a new beginning with her 
industry and commerce? Where does she stand 
after five years of blockade and commercial isola- 
tion? 

At the time of the outbreak of the war Ger- 
many had, as all the world knows, a great and 
rapidly growing international commerce. She 
was, it seemed, well on the way to outstrip all 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 83 

competitors. Why did she attempt a world con- 
quest by war when she had a world conquest by 
commerce apparently certain? I used to ask this 
question at Great Headquarters. The answer 
I got was the shallow clever one: "Exactly; 
that proves, doesn't it, that it was not we who 
started the war or wanted war. We were al- 
ready winning over France and England in the 
race for world-power. Why should we risk the 
chance of war? " 

Echo murmurs, " Why? " 

Perhaps no one, not even those Germans who 
did want war and compelled war, can answer sat- 
isfactorily. Perhaps the very taste of success- 
ful conquest by commerce was like the rank savor 
of warm blood to the carnivore, exciting the ap- 
petite. Perhaps conquest by commerce, swiftly 
as it was really moving, seemed irritatingly slow 
compared to the possibilities of possession by 
war. Perhaps it is all to be referred for answer 
to that convenient escape from answer, the 
extraordinary, the unfathomable German psy- 
chology. 

At any rate, whether we, or Germany, can an- 
swer this conundrum, or not, our other queries 



84 Germany in the War and After 

touching the actual situation which faces Ger- 
many about to begin again the long climb uphill, 
and the probabilities of her manner and rate of 
ascent, are capable of more promising considera- 
tion. We may be able to find answers to these 
queries that will have some degree of correct- 
ness, because there are certain ascertainable facts 
to start from. 

In the first place Germany's food outlook for 
the coming harvest year must be considered, as 
daily bread is requisite for daily toil, whether in 
factory or counting house, in shop or govern- 
ment bureau; or, indeed, on the very farm itself 
where the food is produced. 

The outlook for this year's grain crop is not bad. 
It is perhaps not as good as it was earlier in the 
summer, for there was bad weather in May, but if 
there is 85 per cent, of a normal crop — and the 
German authorities insist that nothing better than 
that can be hoped for because of the lessened 
acreage planted, the lessened man-power avail- 
able and the lack of fertilizers — it would not re- 
quire an impossibly large importation of grain 
and fats, to maintain a fairly sufficient working 
ration for all the people through all the coming 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 85 

year. The German food controller, Schmidt, 
thinks that, with any sort of effective government 
in the saddle, he can lay his hands on at least 
two-thirds of the crop, for official rationing to 
the people; the other third will partly be fed to 
animals by the farmers, and partly escape into the 
hands of the illegal food-trade, the Schleich- 
handel. But even thus out of control it will, 
at least, find its way into the mouths of men and 
stock. 

If a million, or better one and a half million tons 
of bread grains (wheat and rye) can be im- 
ported — and with America's enormous wheat crop 
to draw on, plus what is available from Argen- 
tina and Australia that ought to be easily possible 
— a sufficient, if not extravagant, bread ration can 
be assured. 

It is not so promising as to potatoes. Posen 
has been the greatest potato-producing part of 
Germany, but Posen has a new name now — or 
rather an old one restored. It is Posnania again; 
Polish Posnania. This means a distinct lessening 
of the German potato supply, although it may 
well be that Poland can sell some of its Posnanian 
potatoes to the German government -. — at a price. 



86 Germany in the War and After 

This matter of price, not only of potatoes, but 
of bread and meat, of all food, indeed, is going 
to be one of the looming subjects of difficulty and 
discussion among all the German people all 
through the coming year, as where is it not a 
looming subject. The fixed price for wheat to be 
paid the German producer has been, during the 
past year, but little over a dollar a bushel. But 
with a fixed, or, rather, minimum price for Ameri- 
can wheat of more than two dollars a bushel on 
the farm, and with an as yet indeterminate, but 
certainly pretty serious cost of transportation from 
Iowa to Hamburg, how is the German govern- 
ment going to hold the German farmer down to 
receiving but a dollar for his wheat and rye, 
when it is paying two or three times as much for 
the necessary importations. If they do not pay 
the German farmers more these farmers will not 
be very enthusiastic about planting next spring; if 
they do pay them more the price of bread to the 
factory workman is going to be a simple, but ef- 
fective, argument for Bolshevism. 

The meat supply is bound to be low; Germany 
has had no concentrated feeds to fatten her ani- 
mals, although there is forage enough from this 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 87 

year's crop to carry the animals alive through the 
winter. The German herds have not been greatly 
reduced, the reduction being nothing like, for ex- 
ample, that of the French herds, but the milch cat- 
tle are giving only about one-half the normal 
milk yield; this because of lack of concentrates. 
However, the opening of the North and Baltic 
Seas again to the German fishermen will help 
out in the meat difficulty, and the ability to trade 
freely with Denmark and Holland will help out 
in the line of dairy products. Germany will have 
vegetables and fruits enough to get along with, 
and her native sugar production will be sufficient to 
provide a reasonable ration, even though it will 
take more than next year to get back to the old 
exporting basis. 

Altogether, Germany, with its ports open to 
importations and with a financial arrangement 
sufficiently generous on the part of foreign export- 
ers, ought to be on a sufficiently sound food basis 
to begin its uphill climb without facing the starva- 
tion specter whose presence would mean no climb- 
ing at all. 

But food is only the beginning. One cannot 
work without food, but neither can one without 



88 Germany in the War and After 

raw materials to work with, equipped factories 
to work in, men to do the work, and markets for 
the output. What is the present situation in Ger- 
many as regards these conditions? 

Germany's war chest at the beginning of the 
war contained more than money. There was in 
it a good supply of the raw materials of war, such 
as copper, nickel, tin, asbestos, rubber, and cotton, 
and the other things needful for munitions and 
transportation which were not native to the coun- 
try. And in the first years of the war, before the 
blockade was really effective, more of these ma- 
terials were imported. In 19 15 Germany was 
able to get in nearly one-half of her usual pre- 
war annual importation of cotton. There were 
also certain reserve stocks of native raw materials, 
so that any lessening of production because of a 
heavy diversion of man-power to the army would 
not handicap the needs of the war-lords. 

But as the war ran on, longer, much longer, 
than the General Staff had ever counted on, these 
accumulations were exhausted. Then came the 
days of strenuous attempts to smuggle in every 
least bit of needed metal, cotton, wool and rub- 
ber, of wholesale systematized stripping of the oc- 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 89 

cupied territories even to name-plates from the 
doors and wool from the mattresses, of substitute 
alloys and pine bark " cotton." All industrial 
production for export stopped, of course, at the 
very beginning of the war, and production for 
home use was made over into production for war 
use. Before the war Krupp's steel output was 
over 90 per cent, for civilian purposes; in 19 17 it 
was over 90 per cent, for war purposes. The 
great dye factories became instantly, and with 
almost no interruption of work, factories for high 
explosives. German industry was gradually all 
concentrated on meeting the one crying need : war 
supplies. German raw materials were all used, 
and used up, to produce things of destruction, 
which were themselves destroyed in destroying. 
The result of all this was to leave Germany, 
when the end of the war came, with a certain 
amount of manufactured war supplies on hand, 
a small amount of native raw materials waiting to 
be converted into more war supplies, and almost 
no stocks of supplies for civilian use. As to 
stocks of manufactured articles for export — which 
is a matter the business men of other countries are 
much interested in and concerning which many 



90 Germany in the War and After 

guesses have been made — it is not easy, perhaps 
it is impossible, to speak with certainty. But one 
may be pretty confident that all talk of Germany's 
being prepared, the minute the blockade is re- 
leased, to dump large quantities of her special 
products such as dye-stuffs, chemicals, scientific in- 
struments, potash, and the rest, on to the markets 
of the world is idle talk. There were probably 
considerable stocks of some of these things on 
hand when the war began but many of them were 
materials which could be made use of for war pur- 
poses by Germany herself; and these were cer- 
tainly used. And the labor, coal and raw ma- 
terial difficulties certainly permitted no extensive 
manufacture during the Armistice period. 

However, with the demand for war supplies at 
an end, and with importation of raw materials 
again possible Germany can turn her attention — 
all of it not required to be concentrated on internal 
political, financial and social problems >. — to be- 
ginning to build up her industries for the produc- 
tion of civilian articles for home need and for 
export. This attention must first be directed to 
the re-conversion of her converted factories. The 
factories for high explosives can easily become 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 91 

factories for dye-stuffs and chemicals again; 
Krupp's can reverse the percentage of its steel out- 
put from 90 per cent, war to 90 per cent, civilian 
purposes. Some other factories cannot be so 
quickly put back into peace-time work. 

But the re-conversion of factories is perhaps 
the least of the difficulties to be met. Two others 
especially are of great importance. 

There is a scarcity of coal — although there need 
not be a scarcity for any particular industry if the 
government decides to cut somewhere else. Some 
coal must be exported in exchange for certain in- 
dispensable imports, as, for example, to Switzer- 
land, Holland and Denmark for food. Also 
what coal there is has become very expensive. 
The cost of coal per ton has risen about 300 per 
cent., imposing a great increase in the cost of man- 
ufacture. 

There is a scarcity of skilled labor. The Gen- 
eral Staff kept skilled labor out of the army as 
long as it could but before the end came much 
of it had to be enrolled, and many of the men 
were killed or mutilated. In addition the recon- 
struction work in Belgium and France, demanded 
by the treaty, will keep much German labor busy 



92 Germany in the War and After 

for a long time. What there is left for the Ger- 
man factories will have to be paid for at two to 
three times the pre-war rate; and it will return 
a much lessened output than in the good old days 
of nine and ten hours — they are eight-hour days 
now — and of a high industrial morale. That 
morale is, certainly for the moment, gone. 

Finally there are the great political and eco- 
nomic changes to take into account ; the changes al- 
ready made, the changes that are still to come. 
These changes affect both labor and capital. 
They give labor a control it has not had before 
which will be exercised in directions opposed to 
the old exploitation of man-power in manufac- 
turing. And they make capital afraid. Initia- 
tive under these risks will be lessened; there will be 
a reduction of working capital to the lowest 
amount possible ; fears of sequestration will keep 
capital out of sight; capital will have a dispropor- 
tionate share of the war-debt to pay; there will be 
" socialization " of certain industries, with its 
doubtful effect on efficiency. 

But Germany will undoubtedly return to work; 
she must, or literally fall to pieces. Business will 
undoubtedly try to resume its old methods of gain- 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 93 

ing and dominating foreign markets, but to do 
this will it have that powerful government sup- 
port that the old regime gave it, and will it not 
need exactly this kind of support more than ever 
before? 

Altogether, to my thinking, fears of a quick re- 
sumption of German industrial and commercial 
dominance in world trade seem to me only 
fears of the thoughtless mind, the mind that 
does not take new circumstances into account but 
works in a groove creased by experience of days 
and conditions that are gone and kept open by 
memories of a time that is past. On the other 
hand hopes of a less dangerous but a reasonable 
and needed resuming of German industry will have 
every chance of realization if the world outside 
Germany is fairly generous as to credit, and the 
world inside Germany finds soon some political 
stability. 

In all discussions of the future of Germany, 
which attempt to point out probabilities based on 
premises of actual material conditions, one con- 
stantly meets a certain kind of argument in rebut- 
tal which is triumphantly summed up in the expres- 
sion: " You can't tell me; I know Germans." 



94 Germany in the War and After 

The idea is that the future of Germany will be 
determined by Germans and not by material facts, 
not by conditions imposed by the rest of the world 
or by the presence or absence of raw materials 
and coal, and labor, and money, or by any other 
hard and fast material circumstances. And the 
idea is, further, that Germans will always behave 
as we have seen them behave. It is on the basis 
of this behavior that we claim that we know them. 
But does, indeed, anybody really " know Ger- 
mans." Because Germans are human beings like 
ourselves and because they read the same history, 
study the same mathematics and science and 
philosophy, speak a language that we can acquire, 
enjoy the same music and pictures, live, in a word, 
as we live, can we, from the experience of knowing 
ourselves, know Germans? We have, most of us, 
certainly decided that the Germans, from the ex- 
perience of knowing themselves, certainly do not 
know other people. Their behavior during the 
war has shown that they did not know English, 
Belgians or Americans. But whether this be- 
havior, as we have seen it with horror and dis- 
may, is the only thing we are to take into account 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 95 

in our attempt to prophesy as to German future 
doing and becoming seems to me very doubtful. 

The world needs a better knowledge of human 
biology; a more developed science of the human 
species. We need to know much more of the pos- 
sible influence of environment and education in de- 
termining the psychology and behavior of a given 
human group. Because we are all of the same 
species must all those of us with relatively equal 
endowment of brain and nervous system feel and 
think essentially alike ? And if we do not — as 
of course we really do not — must that prove a 
fundamental distinction among us as to stock and 
biological inheritance? Or can a varying inten- 
sive type of environment and education produce so 
radical a differentiation among us, among groups 
of men of similar basic make-up, that we can 
come to react very differently to the same stimulus, 
and hence be, for the practical purposes of living 
and associating with each other, very different 
kinds of creatures? 

My own experience in the last four years has 
done much to make me over from a convinced be- 
liever in the dominating influence of heredity over 



96 Germany in the War and After 

environment and education in determining human 
behavior and moral makeup into a believer in the 
great possibilities of the modifying effect of en- 
vironmental conditions. Germans are not so dif- 
ferent from Englishmen and Americans by stock, 
that is, by inheritance; but they have been made 
different by education, using the word in its larger 
biological sense. And if this is true there is hope 
that they may be changed again if their educa- 
tion is sufficiently changed; that if their environ- 
ment becomes strongly democratic and democra- 
tizing they may in time become of the democratic 
faith. 

This is not to say that the adoption of a form 
of democratic government necessarily means the 
acquirement of the democratic faith. Democracy 
is more a matter of education, of the acquirement 
of an attitude, of a state of mind and heart, 
the possession of a feeling of good will and gen- 
erosity, a willingness to give every man and every 
group of men a fair chance in both internal and 
external relations, and a gladness to see all man- 
kind move forward and upward. It means less 
class feeling and more human feeling; it is al- 
truism, not egoism. It involves internationalism, 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 97 

but not simply the internationalism of the 
proletariat. 

Can Germans come to this? Not if human 
nature is immutable. But it is not. The pres- 
ent human nature of the Germans is not neces- 
sarily a human nature they have always had. 
Indeed it is certain that it is not. It was much 
worse once, in times very far back, than it is 
now; and in times not so far back it was better 
than it is now. The study of the pre-history of 
the Germans and of the rest of the Europeans — 
of all the human race, for that matter, — shows 
that we were at one time, in the course of human 
evolution, in a stage literally but little removed 
from a truly brute condition. We were simply 
" animal among animals." But by the nature of 
our physical evolution, which gave us speech and 
the possibility of recording our traditions, and 
gave us a special development of mind rather than 
better claws and teeth with which to carry on 
our struggle for existence, our general course of 
evolution diverged importantly from that of the 
other great animals in that it moved toward de- 
velopment on a basis of the mutual aid principle 
rather than the mutual struggle principle. We 



98 Germany in the War and After 

found a genuine biologic advantage in altruism, 
just as the social insects, the ants and bees, most 
successful of insect types, found it. 

Our nature changed ; it became more and more 
what we now recognize by the phrase human na- 
ture as contrasted with brute nature. And it 
changed rapidly ; rapidly, that is, from the biologi- 
cal point of view. 

But the important element which has made 
possible the immense hastening of this change of 
nature, of mental and moral makeup, has been the 
element of environment and education, rather than 
that of pure natural selection. In our social evo- 
lution we have been able to hold fast, by virtue 
of speech and writing, to steps which are not 
actually a part of our natural evolution. We 
have a social or traditional inheritance as well as 
a physical inheritance. And it is by conscious mod- 
ification of our environment and education that we 
can determine the character of this all-important 
influence on our lives. 

The Germans have been made what most of 
them are to-day by a perverted and brutalizing 
education. They were taught that human evolu- 
tion is chiefly determined by crass and cruel nat- 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 99 

ural selection; that the struggle for existence 
among human groups is the complete analogue of 
this struggle among the brute groups. The 
strongest in fighting are the fittest to live. 

Well, if that is so — and it is not; but if it is — 
what do the Germans think to-day about the fit- 
ness and value of their type of cultural develop- 
ment? Is it not, on the very basis of their own 
perverted reading of the factors of evolution, 
proved to be an unfit type? I remember how 
often my old friend, the university professor of 
biology on the German General Staff at Charle- 
ville used to say: " We must inevitably win this 
war for we are biologically right; we are the fit- 
test to live, and hence nature is with us. That 
group which can dominate other groups is the 
chosen of evolution. It should struggle with 
other groups and it should win over them and 
dominate them for the sake of the evolutionary ad- 
vance of the human race." 

Well, does he hold fast to that now? If so 
let him, and the others who believe with him, 
tell the German people that the American, Eng- 
lish, French type of civilization, of social organ- 
ization, of democracy, of human nature, is the 



ioo Germany in the War and After 

right one, the one proven best by biological law. 
For it happens to have won in the struggle. 

But whether these men accept the war's verdict, 
or not, as the verdict of natural law, there will 
be plenty of less scientifically-informed, less sophis- 
ticated but more common-sensible Germans who 
will see in the debacle of Germany's autocracy and 
militarism the need and the opportunity of chang- 
ing the type of German education, of changing the 
environment of Germany's new generation to one 
more in keeping with the world's present stage of 
social evolution. It is the stage of democracy; 
German human nature can be changed to fit in 
with it. We may not " know Germans," but we 
do know something about human beings in gen- 
eral, and Germans are, after all, of that biological 
category. And human beings can change, and 
change fairly rapidly, their consciously controlled 
environment, and hence the character of their so- 
cial evolution. 

There are still sixty million Germans in Ger- 
many: a human group of great potentiality. All 
they need is the proper education; the kind of en- 
vironment that the world has come to under- 
stand as the best for right influence on human 



Germany Now and To-Morrow 101 

evolution. Instead of carrying their old type 
of social organization and political attitude to all 
the rest of the world and imposing it on the rest 
of the world by force, they have now for their 
own sake and the sake of human progress to ac- 
cept another type. I believe that, with time, they 
will see this and do.it. But it will not be done 
in a day. 



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